Google announced back in 2010 it was seeking communities to participate in an experiment involving insanely fast fiber-optic broadband. The plan was called Google Fiber and ultimately Kansas City was chosen. The first homes and businesses with Google Fiber had their 1 Gbps service turned on yesterday.

However, anytime we see internet providers offer theoretical peak speeds, we usually take them with a huge grain of salt. However, it looks like Google Fiber is actually incredibly fast in the real world.

A Google Fiber user named Mike Demarais ran a speed test only minutes after his service went live according to ArsTechnica. He achieved 696.38 Mbps download and an impressive 620.49 Mbps upload.

"The first thing I did was BitTorrent Ubuntu," Demarais said. "I think that took two minutes, let me try it again right now."

The home where Demarais accesses these incredibly fast internet speeds is operated by Homes for Hackers, and is owned by Ben Barreth. Entrepreneurs can live in the house rent and utility free for three months at a time, only needing to pay for their own groceries.

Homes for Hackers is billed as an attempt to kick start high-tech businesses within the city.

Google offers a few different plans for customers. For $120/month you get Gigabit internet (up/down), HDTV service, a Nexus 7 tablet, and 1 TV box. If all you need is gigabit internet, that will only run you $70/month. Google is even offering a "free" internet service (guaranteed for at least 7 years) that provides 5Mb down/1Mb up. However, customers have to pay the $300 "construction fee" that is waived on the two paid packages.

There are no data caps on any of Google's packages (including the "free" one).

And sure, they can request such things from your current "traditional" ISP right now, but most ISP's today like phone and cable companies don't have the means to archive Petabytes of data, and the clever software tools to tie it all together and track it with massive databases. Most ISP's today are just a pipe, with only rudimentary IP logging. Google is a very different animal....

You're going to by lynched for suggesting this up here, so I applaud your bringing it up even more so.

Yes ISPs can and do log at least this level of information, and scarily have been federally protected from privacy suits for what feels like over a decade, but they cannot use that information for marketing nor sell it to others, only national security.

What other companies, most notably Google, did in noticing this was decided they too would start amassing that information, except they were going to use it for commercial ad profits.

Google search definitely brought the internet a few steps forward similar to how Microsoft did the same with Windows coming from DOS.

I'm not much in favor of their overall business practices in the passed 5 years nor am I thrilled with society cumulative shrug off of their right to privacy.

It's alarming something so valuable and entrenched in many of the aspects of our constitution's founding are dismissed by so many today.